While the US tries to pass sweeping anti-piracy and pseudo censorship laws like SOPA, ACTA and CISPA, the UK has adopted a different strategy. In February the UK deemed torrent site The Pirate Bay to be an egregious copyright offender, and as such, the High Court has now ruled that several of the largest ISPs in the country must blacklist the site from their customers.

What happened as a result? The Pirate Bay reported record traffic numbers yesterday, enjoying 12 million more visitors than it’s ever had on the site. In short, the ban actually drove traffic to the site from users who weren’t previously familiar with it.

The Pirate Bay has responded to the verdict by posting the above image on their website instead of their usual skull and crossbones galley ship, and wrote a blog entry about how A) this is an assault on free speech and B) it’s rather meaningless, as there are a ton of ways to get around such a ban, and it details them for any concerned Brits who are afraid they’ll lose access to the site.

Darknet, DNS changes and a whole host of other options are available to seasoned pirates, and the ban won’t slow them down at all. If the ban was to prevent new users from going to the site instead, they’ve actually drawn more attention to the site by singling it out by name in this case, hence the 12 million extra visitors yesterday.

All this really goes to show is that governments still have no clue how to police file sharing sites. The Pirate Bay blacklist is exceptionally easy to circumnavigate by anyone with a remote knowledge of computers (which is true of most people who torrent). Additionally, there are hundreds, if not thousands of other torrent sites which remain unblocked, and the switch to magnet links mean that file sharing is now actually evolving beyond torrents, and will likely be out of the reach of whatever law is put forth next banning the practice.

The most widely-read post I’ve ever written for Forbes was called “You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You,” aimed at the entertainment studio supporters of SOPA. I detailed why it’s a war that can never be won by either side, though I suppose the same is true for governments as well. There simply is no legislative solution. Even a country like China, which has some of the most severe internet restrictions on the planet, has huge rates of piracy despite such supposedly crippling regulation. And if that’s even happening within a system known as “The Great Firewall of China,” what can world leaders possibly do short of shutting off the internet altogether?

Piracy of copyrighted works is not good or just the way pirates claim. But if an attempt to preserve copyright interferes with free speech on the internet, resulting in censorship, or if enforcement of law produces such ridiculous verdicts as charging citizens millions of dollars for downloading a song, the system is clearly broken, and the unwieldy weapons being used against piracy are hurting everyone else instead.